The Count of Carolina, page 17
part #2 of A Clean Up Crew Series
Nicole was sitting on a loveseat next to Dan. She leaned toward him and whispered, “Probably no shower sex either.”
“Shower sex isn’t the only thing I’m interested in!” he muttered in return. “I also like bed sex.”
She gave him a playful swat. It had been her experience that waiting was one of the most difficult parts of what she did. Many days began at five am, knowing that her mark would be in the ideal location to be cleaned at ten pm that night, and she was faced with seventeen hours to fill prior to the moment or so of action. But passing that time with family was far less difficult.
When the sky grew dark, however, she grew a little agitated. In a few hours, they’d drive her to a point far enough from the medical office building to avoid suspicion. From there, she would walk to the address and gain entry, finding her way into the supply closet indicated on the floorplan. Then she’d wait until J.J. either left unscathed or said, “That’s not where it hurts.”
And that wasn’t something she was looking particularly forward to. She waited until after Jimmy Kimmel, then said, “It’s time to go.”
Dan walked around to the rear of the motel and recovered the Rogue. He pulled in front of their door and Nicole and J.J. quickly got in. Nicole gave Dan directions to the place she wanted to be dropped off. The route took them past the office building, which meant he wouldn’t have to worry about finding his way there in the morning when he brought J.J., or rather Britney, for her appointment.
The place she asked to be let out was a Walmart about three blocks from the doctor’s. As with most newer examples of the Walton’s cash cow, the parking lot was illuminated with energy-efficient lighting, but Dan saw that in one corner of the lot, a light was malfunctioning. For the most part, it offered no brightening of the area at all, though every now and then, it came through with a limp flicker, as if to say, “I’m not dead yet!” Nicole directed Dan to stop the SUV there, and to turn it so that the vehicle was between her and the store, preventing her image from being seen on any security cam footage later on.
Greenville did its best to live up to the “green” in the city’s name. As such, many of the strip malls and shopping centers had parking lots that were lined, at least on a couple of sides, by trees. The philosophy was that in areas where residential and commercial properties abutted one another, trees between the parking lot and the homes would minimize complaints from homeowners. The Walmart on White Horse Road followed this example, although the swath of green here separated it from other commercial properties, including the medical office building on nearby Blue Ridge Drive. By sticking to trees and making a wide arc from Walmart to the almost connected stand near the doctor, she could approach unseen, coming out of their cover at the last possible place she could, a point where she could finalize her plans for entry to the building.
Before she exited the vehicle, Nicole turned to the back seat and said to J.J., “I know that I overloaded you with information. Do you feel like you remember most of what I told you? Do you remember the places on his body that will disable him long enough for you to get away? Do you remember the path to the meeting place? Do you remember the code phrase?”
“‘That’s not where it hurts.’ Yes, Mom. I remember. Relax. You’re as jumpy as the Wilson’s little yippy dog,” J.J said, referring to the Yorkie that belonged to their neighbors back in Denver.
“I know. I know you’ll do fine. Don’t mind me. I tend to get a little edgy the closer I get to zero hour.”
“Completely understandable. You’re the one that will be doing the heavy lifting,” J.J. said, prompting a harrumph from Dan. “Unless he gets past Mom and you stop him in the parking lot,” she added, quickly unruffling her father’s feathers. “The point is, I understand why you’d get uptight. I gotta believe this job never really gets easy or routine.”
That insight was exactly what Nicole needed to hear. J.J. was connecting dots that for her had been separated widely, sometimes by years. She put down the temptation to imagine once again what might come to be, which the response also elicited, and nodded her head a single, emphatic time.
“Alright. You stay any longer and it may look fishy on security footage. Love you both!” And with that, Nicole sprinted a few yards and vanished into the trees.
As soon as he lost sight of his wife, Dan put the SUV in drive and casually left the scene. No more than twenty seconds had elapsed between arrival and departure. Viewed on a security cam, it would look far more like someone stopped momentarily to retrieve a dropped cell phone from the floor under the driver’s feet, and far less like they were dropping off an assassin.
Using the sort of agility that nature grants twenty-year-olds, J.J. managed to relocate to the front seat without kicking her father in the head. Dan immediately realized that if he attempted to replicate the maneuver, he would probably break his hip.
“So,” J.J. said playfully. “Waddaya wanna do?”
“Drive back to the motel,” Dan said, laughing.
“Aw, come on, Dad. We’ve been cooped up in there all day!”
“It’s a nice little space. You have to admit, after seeing the outside of the building, when you walked in, you were pretty surprised.”
“I have no problem with the motel room, Daddy. I’d just don’t want to go back yet. Can we get a milkshake or something?”
Dan knew that Nicole had been crystal clear in her instructions to them. After dropping her off, they were to return immediately to room 7 of the Motel Z. That was the smartest, safest, and least likely to get anyone killed thing to do.
But, damn, a milkshake sounded good. Still, Nicole had left no room for interpretation.
“I think we passed a Sonic on the way here. That means we wouldn’t even have to go out of our way,” J.J. said, going on in the unrelenting way that had garnered her at least nine guinea pigs while she was growing up. They were at a traffic light and Dan turned to her, planning to give her a stern face. But she was looking up at him with her mother’s blue eyes and her brow raised inquisitively, as if it were taking its turn to ask Dan to get a nice, cold strawberry shake.
“Well, it’s on the way. So we’re really still going straight back to the motel. Maybe there was an accident?” he said conspiratorially.
“Right! Right! And the cops detoured us…”
“Into the drive-thru!”
“Exactly! I’m trying to decide between banana and caramel.”
“I know what I’m having,” Dan said.
“Everybody in the world knows what you’re having,” J.J. teased. “You have never ordered anything other than a strawberry shake in my presence.”
“You don’t know my struggle.”
“Yeah, yeah. I don’t know your pain either. But I know your milkshake.”
“We’ll see!” Dan could see the sign for the Sonic Drive-In ahead, and as he pulled in, he realized his mouth was watering.
“Good evening. Welcome to Sonic. How can I help you this late evening?”
Dan thought that was a slightly odd greeting, until J.J. whispered, “They close in seven minutes.”
“Oh, you’re going to love us,” he said, realizing the person on the other end of the intercom was being snarky. “I’m going to need a banana shake and a caramel shake and… a strawberry shake!”
A moment later, the voice curtly informed him of the total, and he drove up to the window. There were still a few other customers lingering, most parked in the true, old-school drive-in spots, with their mini menu, buttons for ordering, and curbside delivery. Dan was actually being nice by using the drive thru. Now some poor high school kid trying to save money for his class trip to Paris wouldn’t have to run the three shakes out to them as they waited expectantly, like royalty in their chariot.
That fact didn’t seem to brighten the outlook of the red-headed white kid with Little Rascals caliber freckles whose name tag identified him as “Rasheed.” He opened the window and said, “Eleven dollars and thirty-two cents, please.” He said it with as much vitriol as any worker in the food service industry had ever managed. Dan handed him a twenty as Rasheed held out a pressboard drink carrier, holding the three milkshakes. Dan passed them over to J.J., then he returned his attention to the window.
“You know what? You did such an awesome job of making me feel welcome tonight that I’d like you to keep the change. Buh-bye!” As Dan pulled away, he saw the dumbfounded expression on the ginger’s face that he’d been hoping for. He followed the drive-thru path around as it looped back past the drive-in spots, where the last few hardcore customers were finishing their food. J.J. peeled a straw and slid it into the banana shake. She knew her father ordered both of the flavors she’d mentioned, figuring he’d save the one not selected for Nicole, as the small fridge in the room had a freezer with enough room to accommodate a medium shake.
Just before they pulled back onto the road, J.J. pulled off the hood covering her head and took a long sip of the delicious shake. “Uh! Heaven!” she said.
The world is filled with signs that there is more to our lives than that which can be confirmed by our senses, and sometimes, if one is extremely perceptive and even more extremely lucky, he can witness something not unlike the stars aligning just-so.
So it was, at this very moment, for the president of the Greater Greenville Chamber of Commerce, one Mr. Clyde Davis. In spite of Nicole’s guess that the name of the man whose image stood atop the Chamber’s website, smiling and welcoming you to do business in Greenville, was an alias, Clyde Davis was the man’s real name.
He had been as surprised as anyone to learn there was another man with the same name living in the same city, though in retrospect, Davis was still a very popular name in the South, thanks to Ol’ Jeff, God rest his presidential soul. So was Clyde, for no apparent reason. The story of how he’d learned of his namesake was an interesting one.
He had received a phone call several years back from a man asking for Clyde Davis. It was soon apparent, however, that the man thought he was talking to someone else. Eventually, the misunderstanding was ironed out, but the man on the phone seemed very intrigued, perhaps more so, even, than Clyde, about the coincidence. He identified himself as Conrad Barker, and apologized for the misunderstanding. Then, to Clyde’s complete surprise, just before ending the call, Conrad invited Clyde to lunch the following day.
Clyde, who at the time was between jobs and not at all sure if there would be a lunch the following day, accepted happily. The name Conrad Barker was not completely unfamiliar to him. Barker was, by then, one of the top two or three contractors in Greensville, but the word was that the whole contracting and construction thing was pretty much a front. Perhaps at one point, it had been Barker’s main source of income. It may have even been a legitimate enterprise at one time. But by the time of the serendipitous phone call, those who knew that sort of thing knew that there was very little going on in the city that Conrad Barker wasn’t involved with to some degree. Clyde had been pulled, or had carelessly drifted, to certain endeavors that were technically less than a hundred percent legal, and though he’d never had anything remotely like contact with the “contractor,” nor, if he was being honest, anything spoken above the faintest whisper of his name at all. But Clyde had learned to survive by not missing many whispers.
He settled in for an evening of cable and smiled, wondering if his fortunes were improving at last. It was the last normal night of his life.
For on the following day, he had lunch with Conrad Barker. Clyde had been surprised that Conrad wasn’t bigger. Oh, compared to himself, Conrad was plenty big. No one ever had to remind the pudgy, short man of his place in the evolutionary chain poster. Actually, Clyde could have fit in anywhere along the way, but always as the Beta version of the guy on the poster, the one who didn’t get asked to pose. Still, the size of Conrad’s shadow-reputation was decidedly larger than Conrad himself.
The rest of the events of that day, and indeed every day since then, were, as the cliché declares, a blur. But sometimes, to Clyde, calling it a blur was anything but a banality. Because for him, there had been days when he understood the onomatopoeia of the word as he collapsed at night with an audible sound in his ear: blurrrrrrrrr
And now he was so enmeshed in Barker’s enterprise that he had given up trying to determine where the job ended and he began. And while all of these thoughts were never far from the forefront of his fully conscious consideration, he wasn’t thinking about any of that right now.
He was thinking about how the world sometimes gave you a glimpse of a clockwork perfection beyond what the hands of man could ever hope to construct. Because at that moment, as he’d just finished his second chili-dog and was about to put his Jeep Compass in reverse to leave his drive-in spot at the Sonic… the same one he always came to, because he could see it from the window of his office at the Chamber of Commerce and it always made him hungry, but he waited because a Nissan Rogue was driving so that the passenger side was facing him. And in that very instant, he saw the passenger pull back the hood covering her, to reveal a very familiar head of curly blond hair. She was sipping from a drink as the Rogue rolled by, and turned her head slightly toward him.
It was the girl! The one Conrad had sent him to Denver to snatch. The one he’d delivered to the safehouse, only to have the other Clyde Davis, the one Conrad had thought he was calling that long ago day, drop the ball at the two-yard line. He punched the #1 on his speed dial – Conrad’s personal cell… but it went to voicemail. It wasn’t unheard of that Conrad would let a call go to voicemail, but as it was, only a trusted handful would be calling, so a non-answer was a clear message, rarely indicative of good news.
“Damn,” Clyde said and he redialed as quickly as his chubby digits could manage. When the generic voicemail greeting began to play a second time he threw the phone on the passenger’s seat and started the Jeep. Then he looked up with a start. He’d been so focused on calling Conrad that he hadn’t noticed the Rogue leave and didn’t see which direction it had turned. “Damn, DAMN!” Clyde cursed again as he slammed the tranny into a squawking reverse as he raced to the exit and tried to guess which way they went. There were no vehicles visible in either direction, but Clyde felt that meant it far more likely they’d turned left, since there was a side road onto which they could have gone that was far closer than any turn-offs in the other direction. If they’d gone right, they might have a healthy lead on him, but Clyde would still see their tail lights.
He turned left, then took the first right he came to. He’d hoped he might spot them if he guessed correctly and went fast enough, but still he saw nothing. He kept going, though, because Conrad wasn’t going to be pleased about him spotting the girl then immediately losing her. Besides, the longer he looked for her, the more time before he’d have to face his boss’s wrath.
Clyde had not grown up in Greenville. His family had moved there when he was a junior in high school. So even over fifteen years along, there were parts of the city he didn’t know well. And chief among those sections was the East Side. In fact, he’d done his best to avoid it. Even his early criminal dabbling hadn’t required him to venture to that neighborhood.
However, as he continued to hope that this was the turn that would bring them into sight, he soon realized that was right where he found himself now. He’d managed to get deep into the parts of town that Mom and Dad taught good boys and girls to avoid. He realized that he was driving about ten miles per hour on a street that looked like there was perhaps one building standing along its entire length. Great job, Clyde, he chided himself. First you lose the girl, then you get yourself lost on the East Side. As he passed the building, he saw that it was a rundown motel. Craning his neck to look up at the sign, he saw that most of its neon tubing was broken. Only one letter, a “Z,” glowed a flickering red. The parking lot was completely barren and the parts of the place that didn’t look like they were coming down certainly looked like they were vacant.
He turned hard into the empty lot, yanked the wheel hard left, and punched it, painting out a loud donut. He then went a full twenty miles per hour above every posted speed limit until he was safely back in his house.
Even then, he spent the first half hour trying to control his breathing. When he eventually calmed down, he realized that the neighborhood he’d just escaped was the least of his problems. When Conrad found out that he’d…
Wait a minute.
How would Conrad find out? No one knew anything about this but him! And he’d seen the girl, but she hadn’t seen him. Even if he had, what was she going to do? Call Conrad and say “Your buddy Davis let me get away again.” Seriously?
I’ll just keep my big mouth shut for once. Conrad will never even suspect!
At that moment, his cellphone vibrated on the plastic table next to his chair. He nearly died at the sound of it, and when he saw the name on the screen, he wished he had.
“Hello, Conrad!” he said, trying to stop shaking. “What’s up?”
“What’s up is you called me, dipshit. Twice, in fact. What’s so all-fire important?”
Clyde Davis realized his life had reached a crossroad. He’d benefited greatly from his association with Conrad Barker, going from unemployed to president of the chamber in less than a year thanks to Conrad’s cunning manipulations. He had every reason to be blindly loyal to him and tell the truth about his boneheaded error, even if it meant his life.
Yeah, right.
“I was just calling to check in. I hadn’t heard any updates in a while.”
“You don’t call me for fucking updates, Davis. I’m not the information services, I’m the goddamn boss. Jesus Christ. ‘Calling to check in!’ Shit!”
“Uh, yeah, stupid. That’s what I am. Sorry about that, boss.”
“Why’d ya call twice?”
“Huh?”
“When I didn’t pick up the first time, why did you call my phone a second time?” Conrad said, mockingly enunciating each word.
